The hidden value of intangibles: do CEO characteristics matter?

A great deal of research has examined the relationship between a single CEO attribute and a single measure of firm performance; no attempts have been made to integrate them to create a more global vision of both. Therefore, trying to answer new calls from Wang et al. (2016) or Liu, Fisher and Chen (2018) about a more global vision of the CEO characteristics, the authors are going to take a step forward to combine different CEO characteristics with different firm performance measure in order to show that a certain managerial profile would have an impact on several variables of firm performance. This paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using a sample of 1,236 small firms in high- and medium-high-technology sectors and through the Canonical Correlation Analysis, the authors are able to create different CEO’s profiles that influence on different combinations of firm performance variables.

The authors obtain different CEO’s profiles that influence on different combinations of firm performance variables. Each CEO profile will enhance or diminish one kind of performance measure. The authors found that on the one hand, young, well-educated with external experience CEO profile will enhance innovative performance and firm growth, and on the other hand, old and more internal and external experience CEO profile will enhance the exploitation of external knowledge.

Through this analysis, the authors will be able to provide a more comprehensive analysis of the predictions about the role of CEOs in small firms.